[SOLVED] Formatting a prior RAID hard drive

[LeftyByGrace]

OK, so countless hours trying to solve this problem:

Have an external RAID (8 bay Areca) loaded up with 6TB Hds Am upgrading this with 8TB Hds (hot swap->rebuild). Want to repurpose the 6TB drives, but have been unable to format them for NTFS. (Windows 10). These drives were healthy in the RAID

Have tried every method I can find on the web:

MiniTool partition magic: delete existing partition (RAW) if present, sometimes drive appears unallocated; convert to GPT; create new NTFS partition. Seems to work in MTPM but explorer doesn't recognize it & wants to format it. Formatting in explorer or MTPM fails.

Windows 10 Disk Management: creating partition fails

diskpart - list disk - select disk - clean -> fails with semaphore error (a timeout essentially) Disk Attribute -> not locked/read only

Have also tried formatting it on a Mac with Disk Utility, fails

Currently wiping the disk (likely several days to complete :-(

Any thoughts on what's going on (and how to fix it?)

Thanks

 

[Ralston18]

Powershell perhaps?

For example:

https://4sysops.com/archives/managing-disks-with-powershell/

Search for other links - likely that you will find more information and some specific "how-to's".

 

[LeftyByGrace]

Think it's solved: was using an old USB docking station, which had worked fine on smaller drives (<4TB). Got a hunch it might be a hardware issue, since same problem on W10 and Mac OS X.

New Sabrent docking station: works no problem. Suspect old bios on docking station was causing problems

Thanks for the help

 

[popatim]

Nice find.
I've run into both issues before and use a Sabrent USB dock now myself. So far its worked really well.